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Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#151

Post by michaelvoz »

haolez wrote: post #136

We wanted to create a routing app for bikes, which would take in consideration cliffs, dangerous streets and the likes. With our internal team, we’ve managed to create a killer backend that would do all the hard routing stuff without issues. It was better than Google Maps in most cases! Now, we just needed the app. We used all our money to pay a third party contractor to make the app, and they failed miserably. We ne…

Uber advanced technologies, routing tech lead here. This sounds interesting. Lets chat?

You can email me: michaelv at uber

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#152

Post by the_clarence »

god_bless_texas wrote: post #4

I chased and successfully won a huge customer for my small and fledgling startup. I chased and successfully won a sole service contract for a key part of their business process. I allowed a credit situation with them to grow over the course of 3 months while I allowed them to have 60 day terms. And then, they went out of business and left me holding the bag with $150,000 in unpaid AR after I spent $90,000 generating…

Can someone in this thread summarize what are the terms? AR, AP, APR, retainer, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#153

Post by ckastner »

haolez wrote: post #136

We wanted to create a routing app for bikes, which would take in consideration cliffs, dangerous streets and the likes. With our internal team, we’ve managed to create a killer backend that would do all the hard routing stuff without issues. It was better than Google Maps in most cases! Now, we just needed the app. We used all our money to pay a third party contractor to make the app, and they failed miserably. We ne…

> We used all our money to pay a third party contractor to make the app, and they failed miserably

Where did you hire/find the third party contractor?

Friends of mine, in two separate startups, got burnt badly by those outfits that offer the "native apps for iOS and Android" package for $10K or so.

I talked to some of those "developers" once, when I helped my friend troubleshoot an issue. It was horrible. They were so inept, they couldn't solve a problem if you provided a solution to them (literally -- they failed at copy-pasting).

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#154

Post by flaviojuvenal »

the_clarence wrote: post #152
god_bless_texas wrote: post #4

I chased and successfully won a huge customer for my small and fledgling startup. I chased and successfully won a sole service contract for a key part of their business process. I allowed a credit situation with them to grow over the course of 3 months while I allowed them to have 60 day terms. And then, they went out of business and left me holding the bag with $150,000 in unpaid AR after I spent $90,000 generating…

Can someone in this thread summarize what are the terms? AR, AP, APR, retainer, etc.

AR/AP: https://www.diffen.com/difference/Accounts_Payable_vs_Accoun...

APR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annual_percentage_rate

Retainer: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/retainer-fee.asp

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#155

Post by wink »

hef19898 wrote: post #142
owyn wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. That's a great reason to advocate for universal health care in the US, because it lets people work for a more risky startup without having to worry about that particular risk!

Partially I agree. On the other hand there are alot of cases of smaller companies not paying social security and health insurz for there employees in Germany despite having universal health care.

That sounds... kind of weird, especially the "a lot of cases" part.

If you have an official company with official employees (and if either is not true, then well, everything's illegal anyway and your employees are not really employees) the health insurance will be on your toes quite quickly to pay your stuff (as I've experienced firsthand).

The only thing I can think about is having all your staff as unpaid/underpaid interns, but then they're not employees and your exploiting them anyway.

Would love to have some details on this.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#156

Post by denkmoon »

- Founder gave up, went bush for weeks at a time, and I (the "right hand man") had no experience managing staff let alone running a company without the founder. We wasted tonnes of money on staff that I couldn't adequately manage or train which resulted in huge technical debt on almost every feature.

- I should have opened my mouth 6-12 months earlier and put my foot down regarding my own capabilities. Also, hiring great programmers is really hard.

I'm still trying to work out how to get co-workers and staff to come ask me questions when they need to, I'm unsure if it's because I'm not approachable (I always try to be!) or if they don't recognise that they need to ask a question.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#157

Post by scabarott »

haolez wrote: post #136

We wanted to create a routing app for bikes, which would take in consideration cliffs, dangerous streets and the likes. With our internal team, we’ve managed to create a killer backend that would do all the hard routing stuff without issues. It was better than Google Maps in most cases! Now, we just needed the app. We used all our money to pay a third party contractor to make the app, and they failed miserably. We ne…

I didn't quite understand this. Presumably, you're developers and just created a I assume fairly complex backend product (better than Google Maps). What stopped even just one of you from picking up a book on react-native/electron/whatever and knocking out a workable front-end? Did you exceed your runway, run out of time etc? edit: to clarify, I meant after the third-party didn't work out. Also not critiquing just genuinely curious

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#158

Post by the_clarence »

tomasien wrote: post #18

I've had two startups "fail" for unusually clear reasons: Startup #1: too hard to believe it could be big. Widely loved consumer website we tried to fund with angel/VC money, and it was too implausible it could ever be a $1b+ company. We needed a non-VC strategy to fund that business but didn't realize that - ran out of gas. Startup #2: found PMF, business-model fit, high-growth, and had an amazing team. Blown up by…

Pmf?

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#159

Post by tluyben2 »

The most valuable lesson I had from the companies I ran/run is that both sales and getting investment are both volume plays. If am a technical guy and I used to be that even more than I am now; I thought people who could do sales were deeply magical creatures. But every time we had a 'super sales' (usually co-founder because of the 'super' part), the super wore off and turned into no sales which killed or downsized companies eventually. I only fairly recently found out that it is just a matter of meeting as many people as you can and having as many sales pitches as you can. Investors the same thing, although that depends a bit more on the phase and the business than the sales.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#160

Post by rqmedes »

As an engineer what I learnt was that commercialization is the most important factor and that its difficult/near impossible to sell without strong branding, marketing and networking. I now work for a multi-billion dollar company, the product I developed is superior to theirs in almost every regard. What they have is an amazing marketing team.
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